One of the busiest junctions in the country.

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As Zach wrote about earlier this week, King County Metro and Sound Transit will be running tests this morning to see how many buses Metro can squash into the tunnel during PM peak after Link trains move to 6-minute peak headway in 2016 (See page 106.).

Given the tunnel closure, the Highway 99 closure, and the SR 520 closure today, be sure to check to see if and where your bus is being re-routed. For those who have to transfer at SODO Station, catch route 21, 97, 101, 106, 131, 132, 150, or 594. Routes 21, 131, and 132 are over on 4th Ave S, so be sure to get off at the Lander stop.

Metro is right to try to get as much usage out of the tunnel as possible, without turning it into a worse crawl than now. Sound Transit is right to try to optimize wait+travel time for the state’s largest-ridership transit line (by orders of magnitude after 2016). Unless the two agencies work out a deal, neither may get what they want.

The problem is predominately during PM peak, when the vast majority of downtown riders are paying as they board, and roughly a third of them are still fumbling change. Both downtown street-level traffic and the transit tunnel slow to a crawl, and riders in the tunnel are treated to 2-8 minutes of being trapped on buses and trains waiting in between stations for the next platform to clear.

Allow me to offer a modest suggestion. Let’s call it the “6/10 Compromise“: Continue reading “A 6/10 Compromise?”

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Discover Magazine:

An interesting study just published examines the rates of clinical depression experienced by workers in different jobs.

It turns out that people involved in ‘Local and Interurban Passenger Transport’ are most likely to be treated for depression. By contrast, those employed in ‘Amusement and Recreational Services’ are less than half as likely to experience it – at least, in Western Pennsylvania, where the research was conducted.

The article questions whether these results are generalizable beyond Western Pennsylvania, but the study’s conclusion that

Industries with the highest rates tended to be those which, on the national level, require frequent or difficult interactions with the public or clients, and have high levels of stress, and low levels of physical activity.

is at least intuitive.

Dealing with riders all day would certainly depress me, but what say you, drivers? Are your colleagues a morose bunch? Is it a naturally depressing job?

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Yesterday’s exercise on ST3 budgeting was unclear enough to prompt a friendly email from ST spokesman Geoff Patrick. So I’d like to clarify that subarea equity isn’t a matter of strictly dividing money along subarea boundaries; I’ve always understood it to be a negotiation process based on the interests of each subarea. For example, I’d expect Pierce County to contribute a significant portion of any run from Federal Way to Tacoma, as that segment is a much higher priority for them than for South King County. As Mr. Patrick put it:

State law on this topic is mainly about reporting. As long as a ballot measure identifies where the funds originate and are spent, Board members can define equity in whatever fashion they believe serves constituents. Note that the past ballot measures have included investments outside subarea boundaries spanning all three of our transit modes, and particularly Sounder and ST Express. The decisions weren’t about where the service is located but about desired destinations and what the Board understood the priority for each subarea to be. It is only after a measure passes that its provisions become legally binding, and a future ballot measure doesn’t have to use the same approaches as past measures.

Emphasis mine. Given the limited value of Snohomish County rail to other subareas, and the limited value of the other projects to Snohomish County, I don’t think it in practice affects my choice to dimension the project according their needs. But it does provide would-be package builders with more flexibility if they can make plausible arguments that a project outside a boundary serves that subarea’s direct interests.

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Listicles that rank cities according to ill-defined criteria are nearly worthless internet click bait, but as usual fivethirtyeight brings some rigor to the process:

The measure used is “unlinked trips,” which counts transfers during the same journey as separate trips. This figure can be converted to “trips per resident” by dividing unlinked trips in 2013 by 2012 population estimates from the American Community Survey (ACS), yielding a figure that’s neatly comparable among cities of varying sizes.

Note that these are metro areas, not single municipalities. As you might imagine, New York blows everything else away, much-maligned San Francisco/Oakland is second, and DC is third.  Then it’s a mix of transit cities and college towns. Atlantic City, NJ is last at #290, with 0.5 transit rides per person per year.

Here are the Washington State results with some interesting reference points thrown in:

10. Philadelphia (67.8)

12. Seattle (63.6)

13. Portland (58.4)

17. Bellingham (49.6)

19. Eugene (46.5)

42. Olympia-Lacey (30.2)

43. Spokane (30.1)

Continue reading “Transit Rides per Capita”

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• Capital Improvements for Routes 1, 2, and 13 (north) are done, saving up to two minutes per trip.
• 106-unit building planned for First Hill.
• Apply for a seat on the PSRC policy board, shape federal funding decisions.
• Rail union unhappy with BNSF proposal for one-person train crews.
• Turn commuter rail into rapid transit.
• This seems like a dream job for a local transit nerd.
• Perhaps inevitably, a Save the 61 movement forms. Getting more of their neighbors to vote last spring would have been more helpful.
• Mercer Island still seeks bailout out of their disastrous decision to build a smaller parking garage for aesthetic reasons; this time, a second lot.
• Pitchforks out at post-scandal Island Transit meetings.
• Seattle adjusts parking rates ($) to reflect demand.
• ST collects opinions on Sumner Station improvements.
• North Link construction will consume a strip mall.
• FHWA roadway engineering standards catching up with reality.
• Is Pioneer Square coming around?
• Rent control in NYC, on the way out?
• NYT eulogizes ($) President’s 2011 State of the Union High Speed Rail initiative. Pro Tip: Next time, try a major investment the North East Corridor.
• Gondolas in Bolivia.
• Tee hee, we’re our own category, if a low-performing one.

This is an open thread.

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The Long-Range Plan studies are done, providing the Sound Transit Board with a menu of projects with which they can compose the next ballot measure. That assumes that the legislature, one day soon, gives them the authority to do so. But now that they have the price list for various projects, how much money would there be to spend?

In principle, the legislature can do whatever it wants in granting revenue authority, although what regional lobbyists request will shape the legislation. To provide some form to this exercise, I’ll make two assumptions:

Subarea Equity. Under current law, Sound Transit must use money collected in each subarea in that subarea. In principle, new legislation could change this rule, and no less than the Mayor of Seattle is in favor of doing so. A transfer from high-revenue, low-demand East King to low-revenue, high-demand South King has its merits. However, regardless of the law, a substantial transfer of funds from one area to another is likely electoral suicide. ST sent me the most recent revenue projections for 2009-2023 (below), which state that tax revenue from Snohomish, North King, South King, East King, and Pierce will arrive in the ratio 1 : 2.4 : 1.2 : 2.0 : 1.4, respectively. Of course, different taxes will generate money in different ratios, and the ST3 revenue period will be different than this one, but using this is much better than a wild guess.

(Before you take these actual numbers and start buying stuff, note that these are year of expenditure dollars, while the ST Long Range Plan figures are 2014 dollars. In other words, the LRP projects cost more if you’re using these figures.)

Continue reading “A Budget for ST3”

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I’m pleased to announce a new forum for long-form discussion about Greater Seattle transit and land use called “Page 2.” Although we take pride in the fact that Seattle Transit Blog’s front page maintains a high standard of discourse, that standard requires work — work that substantially limits how much reporting and opinion we can bring you.

Our solution is to open up a forum for the broader community to submit their own posts with less editorial scrutiny. This isn’t a free-for-all: submissions must relate to transit and land use, no spam is allowed, and as in the comment policy vitriolic ad-hominem attacks and other anti-social behaviors are forbidden. To support those goals, we require registration for post authors: let us know if you’d like an account. Our guest post guidelines continue to be a good set of hints on how to write effectively on STB.

If you’re here for the carefully curated writing, rest assured that this will have basically no effect on how the STB main page works. However, a nice side effect will be a streamlined system for submitting guest posts. Our intent is to take the very best from Page 2, apply whatever editing is necessary, and “promote” it to STB for distribution on our RSS and Twitter feeds, as well as getting the usual play on the front page. Alert readers may have noticed that some Page 2 posts have already appeared on the main page, indicated by the new byline for guest posts. Although for now we’re going to allow handles on Page 2, any promoted post must conform to our usual policy on real names for authors.

If you don’t have the fortitude to write long form pieces, but can’t get enough of our comment threads, I encourage you to check there every few days and see what the community has produced. We invited a few longtime commenters to start building up content there in time for launch, but what they wrote was so good that I promoted it all to the main page, so at the moment there isn’t anything there. Check back later this morning for a subject that is sure to inspire some creativity. You can certainly comment on Page 2 posts just like any other.

This new feature is entirely a product of the tireless effort of Frank Chiachiere, who had to work through several major issues and deserves all the credit for its design and implementation. Although this is an experiment and all of you will ultimately decide its success, I’m excited about it and have high hopes you’ll be excited too.

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The Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel (DSTT) and Link’s Stadium Station will be closed this Saturday, August 9th from approximately 5-11am. The closure will allow Metro and Sound Transit to test the joint U-Link and bus operations that will be in place from 2016-2019.

Link trains will terminate at SODO, and Shuttle Route 97 will operate from SODO to Westlake, serving all tunnel stops. Buses will operate their full routes, albeit on the surface. See Metro’s Alerts page for more details of each route’s surface routing.

U-Link will boost peak frequency from 8 trains per hour to 10 per hour, and those tunnel slots either have to be accommodated via improved operating efficiency or by surfacing buses. Metro obviously has every incentive to keep its buses in the tunnel, as the tunnel saves riders time and saves Metro money. Sound Transit, of course, has every incentive for U-Link to be as fast and reliable as true rapid transit should be. These incentives being at odds, tests like these try to find the operating level where Metro maximizes its bus throughput without damaging U-Link’s reliability.

Long term, of course, the tunnel is slated to be rail-only, but not until 2019.  In the event that joint ops at 2016 service levels bring the tunnel to a standstill, some additional buses will need to be removed. For a prioritization framework about which routes are worth keeping in the tunnel, I wrote on the subject in 2012 when the RFA was ending, and I think the analysis still holds up fairly well.

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